Sunday, 31 January 2010

You Must Suffer, So He Feels Good About Himself...

Campaigners, including Evan Harris of the Liberal Democrats, claim the current law is clumsy and unable to accommodate vastly differing circumstances, with the same blanket law of murder applying to Myra Hindley and the Kay Gilderdales of this world. Harris and pressure groups such as Dignity in Dying would like a new law that would somehow accommodate "mercy killers", but it's a desire I find abhorrent; downright offensive in fact.

Why so? How can someone else's decision in this possibly affect you?

Those of a religious persuasion (and I count myself among them) talk about the sacredness of life, non-believers of its inviolability. The Christian view is that life simply isn't ours to take – it's God-given, and his alone to end.

The moment a terminally ill person is granted the legal right to kill herself, the instant corollary is that other feeble forms of life – the late-term foetus with spina bifida, the senile bed-ridden old woman whose interminable lingering is a torment to her family – are seen as of lesser value than that of a healthy person's and become easier to let go.

Yes, but that's what we have laws for. Are you really saying that you believe God gave us all free will, but not the smarts to use it?

But what about the sufferers, don't they have a right to escape their pain? No, not if we believe that life is sacred. We've become so used to the idea that suffering is to be avoided at all costs, that the very notion that we might have to bear it is seen as a violation of some emerging right to a minimum level of comfort. But suffering has a positive purpose.

OK, well, that's just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard...

Of course it's tough for the sufferer, but it's only through witnessing the pain and agony of others that we properly develop empathy and compassion.

Except it clearly hasn’t worked with you, Hall….

Many of us will suffer at our end, and for years beforehand; but, I would maintain, we have a duty to tolerate our suffering as a sacrifice for the respect our society has learned to accord to life generally: only through coping with and witnessing our suffering will rising generations gain true respect for the miracle of conception and all that follows it.

7 comments:

After those whose lives are a burden to them have been disposed of, we'll start on those whose lives are a burden to us. By which, of course, is not meant dole scrotes and criminals, but people who have paid tax for forty years and now have the temerity to require NHS treatment.

Your title captures this abhorrent logic perfectly. This man just stopped short of saying that suffering improves the sufferer, that his Sky Fairy approves (or even sends) pain and illness. In a theology where the one unforgiveable sin is despair (the sin against the Holy Spirit) these messianic folk feel obliged to preserve the dying from damnation. Screw them and their stone age delusions.

We already allow for legal euthanasia on nonconsenting patients, but a mix of sadism and squeamishness turns this into sanctioned torture -- the idea that some dies 'naturally' if you withhold fluid is an epic fail.

So, as the old joke goes, we're past the point of discussing what we are, now we only need to haggle what price is charged to us.

The actual victim as always is left out in the cold without any protection whatsoever...

A truly vile article from a sick and twisted mind. He has no right to insist that others should suffer from a sense of duty to his sick religion. They have no such duty. The piece is just short of outright sadism.

There is nothing noble about human suffering. If anything, it is dehumanising and degrading. Almost every aspect of our public sector is devoted to the avoidance of human suffering. The Coast Guard, Fire Service, Police, Ambulance, and the NHS are all devoted to the relief of suffering humanity. And almost every charitable organisation from the the Legion to the Cats Protection League is devoted to the relief of suffering.And some bloody holy fool comes along announcing the nobility of agony, and suffering. I really think at least some of these people are perverts.Of course we need safeguards. That is why we have the common law, that is why we have the courts. That is why we require several medical signatures for a cremation certificate. This can be dealt with.